Computers are now an indispensible tool in our daily lives. With the rapid development of electronic technology, computer components (e.g., CPUs, memories, hard disk drives, etc.) are constantly improved in order to provide more powerful functions and be available at lower prices. Such revolutionary advances, however, may cause inconvenience in use. Take the hard disk drive required in every computer for example. A traditional hard disk drive is typically connected to a computer via an Integrated Device Electronics (IDE) interface. The IDE interface advantageously features a low price and high compatibility but has strict limitations on the length of interface cables. Moreover, the IDE interface is highly subject to interference from noises generated by other lines (e.g., power cables, audio cables, etc.). Therefore, ever since the advent of the Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) interface, which has a higher transfer speed, greater error correction ability, and simpler structure than IDE and is hot-swappable, the IDE interface has been replaced by the SATA interface as the connection interface of newly developed computers. But here comes the problem. One who buys a new computer is very likely to find the old hard disk drives, which are configured for the IDE interface, uninstallable in the new computer; as a result, the data in the old hard disk drives cannot be read.
To solve the problem, the IDE/SATA adapter was designed which has a connection port for the IDE interface, a connection port for the SATA interface, and an adapter circuit. An IDE/SATA adapter can be respectively connected to the SATA interface of a computer and the IDE interface of a hard disk drive so that, by the simple adapter circuit, the computer is enabled to read the data stored in the hard disk drive. While the IDE/SATA adapter provides a convenient solution to the problem that an IDE hard disk drive cannot be accessed by a computer with the SATA interface, the IDE/SATA adapter is no more than an adapter and does not contribute to increasing the speed at which the computer can read data from the hard disk drive. Even worse, as an IDE/SATA adapter has to convert between different interfaces, the read speed of a computer connected with such an adapter will be lower than expected. From a user's point of view, therefore, an IDE/SATA adapter is only good for addressing the urgent need for IDE/SATA conversion but does not provide stable and rapid data processing; in short, the existing IDE/SATA adapters leave much room for improvement. Furthermore, apart from IDE and SATA, common interfaces nowadays include Universal Serial Bus (USB), Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), Thunderbolt (codenamed Light Peak), and IEEE 1394 (also known as FireWire). Obviously, the existing IDE/SATA adapters cannot solve the problems associated with conversion between all these interfaces.
In an earlier effort to increase the read and write speeds of hard disk drives, the inventor of the present invention developed a “System and Method for Increasing Read and Write Speeds of Hybrid Storage Device”. The method is briefly described as follows. A control module automatically detects the product information (e.g., capacity, specifications, etc.) of a regular storage unit (e.g., a hard disk drive, a disk array, etc.) and of a high-speed storage unit (e.g., a solid-state drive, a cache memory, etc.) and generates a forward mapping table for the regular storage unit and a backward mapping table for the high-speed storage unit, wherein each table includes a plurality of fields. The control module can write a tag into each field such that the fields of the forward mapping table correspond to the fields of the backward mapping table respectively. When a computer is to read data from or write data into the regular storage unit, the control module finds the corresponding high-speed storage sections of the high-speed storage unit according to the mapping tables and performs the reading or writing operation preferentially on the high-speed storage sections. Thus, the time required for data processing can be substantially reduced, thanks to the higher read and write speeds of the high-speed storage unit.
The inventor believes that the conventional IDE/SATA adapters can be further improved by incorporating the “System and Method for Increasing Read and Write Speeds of Hybrid Storage Device”, and that the improved adapter should be a connection device capable of enabling fast data reading and writing so as to effectively overcome the drawbacks of the existing IDE/SATA adapters. Hence, the issue to be addressed by the present invention is to design a novel connection device by applying the aforesaid method to the conventional IDE/SATA adapters.